“Should we… say something?” she asked.
I looked up. “About what?”
“A prayer, Gardner.” Then a beat while I squinted. “For Freddie.”
“Oh,” I said. “Quickly.”
Shooter looked down, wiping her bloody gloves on her pants. “You lived life fast, Freddie,” she said. “You deserved… slightly better than this. But not much.”
“Good,” I said. “Honest. Heartfelt. Let’s go.”
Shooter stepped outside, and I turned on all the burners to thestove. I lit the pizza boxes and the threadbare couch on fire with a lighter.
I watched as the flames leapt two feet into the air, then closed the mobile home door, careful to catch the locking mechanism that I’d been manipulating. Taking Freddie’s front door key, I snapped it off, breaking it in the lock. When I tried the knob, it wouldn’t open.
We headed out fast, scrambling up the hillside toward the car. When we got to the hedge, I heard a boom and turned.
A TV antenna on the roof of the mobile home had fallen into the scrub brush at the rear of the property. A plume of gas escaped through an exhaust hole in the top of the home, and the blue vapor lit an orange flame that danced across the roof of the structure.
“We had this informant back at ATF,” Shooter said. “He got pneumonia and died. Seven agents attended his funeral, Gardner. Three were pallbearers.”
I made eye contact with her, and the message was clear. Burning up a C.I. might be considered over the line. But with Sandoval close, we had no choice. Right?
CHAPTER TWO
As we headed through the tree line toward our car, a set of lights shone on the curving state highway in the distance.
They were squared off and wide, like a pickup truck, and I stepped back into the greenery and placed a hand on Shooter’s shoulder to hold her still.
A rusted F-150 flew past us, and we emerged from the bushes a few feet from our 2019 Ford Taurus. I placed the containers I’d left in the dirt into the trunk.
As I closed it, another set of lights flickered in the distance. They were rounded, like a sedan. A second set followed close behind. When the first car took the turn at the hilltop, it did so at high speed. The second sedan turned after it, a thirty-foot following distance.
Shit.
Shooter was turned away from me, staring back at the mobile home, as the flames climbed into the sky.
“Down,” I yelled.
We dove to the ground, our faces in the dirt, our bodies buried in the leaves that covered the forest floor.
“If this is poison ivy…” Shooter mumbled before going quiet.
On the highway, the two sedans zipped by us.Fffft. Fffft.
The sound of their engines faded, neither of them slowing to look over at our Taurus, which was parked off the shoulder, obscured by the same greenery we were hiding in.
Shooter stood up then, and we crept back toward the tree line. The live oaks and mahogany provided cover, and we watched the first sedan pull in outside of Freddie’s mobile home. Then the second.
The door to the first car opened, and two men got out. One of them hustled over to the mobile home and grabbed the door handle. He yanked his hand away, as if the metal had burned him. The next man wrapped his jacket around his palm and tried it, but the door didn’t budge.
“Freddie!” they hollered.
Shooter and I stared, transfixed, as the flames inside the mobile home filled the two windows.
“You’re gonna have to answer for this,” she mumbled. “You know that, right?”
My eyes moved from the fire to her.
